Just like a brochure that you pass around to prospective customers, a web site promotes businesses to a global audience. There is more than just having a nice looking web site.

Brochures have to be distributed through mass mailing, in person, or handing them out during networking events. That’s how people get them to get a glance about a company’s services and products. So what about web sites? How do people know about them? By having a web site on the Internet doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reaching people’s browsers. How can a web site become a business promotional tool?

Know your audience and impress them

Who are your audiences? That should be the first thing you need to think about. How your web site is designed is based on the type of audiences you’re targeting.

The site’s color scheme, logo design, and the overall layout can have a big impact of your web presence. A web site is a portrayal of your business image; it’s a way of branding your business products and services. Which crowd are you trying to impress? The way your site looks can persuade a certain audience. For instance, a business web site that sells web hosting services doesn’t look the same as a web site for selling fashion wear. The look and feel would be totally different. Take a look at these web sites and see the difference. Here is the Versace web site at http://www.versace.com/flash.html, and take a look at this merchant services company at http://www.americaonems.com/.

Target your audience’s interest

How your web site is constructed should be based on your customer’s interest. There are different types of customers. Each one looks for a particular topic that meets their needs. To trigger your web site to the type of audiences you are targeting, it must contain information that they’re looking for. Otherwise, they would skip your site and search for another web site. What are the basic ingredients for a web site that would incite and keep customers’ interests?

• It must be user-friendly. That is it’s easy to navigate from one page to another.
• It is easy to read. It’s not cluttered and busy. The color scheme is calm for the eyes.
• It has all the information about the company, the services, the products, and how to contact information.
• It is not filled with a lot of multi-media content such as cartoon animations and sounds. Multimedia content should be minimized and have a purpose.

Optimize and submit your web site to the search engines.

Nobody would know about your web site unless it’s been submitted to the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Submitting your site means telling the search engines its existence.

Optimizing your web site requires adding the Meta tag codes for the keywords and descriptions, title, and alt tags. Each page must have a proper title tag that describes a page, and the alt tag helps describe the images contained on the web site. The description describes what the web site is all about. Why are these tags important to search engines?

Users use Google, Yahoo, or MSN to search for web sites that contain the information they’re looking for. When they search, they enter keywords. They are usually two to three words. For instance, if I were looking for a web site relating to a specific type of ballroom dance instructors in New England, I would enter ”NH Tango teachers” as an example. Choosing the right keywords is essential, so that your web site can be found easily.

Your content should contain keywords also, because Google crawls the web site’s content including the title, alt, and description tags. Besides Google, most search engines crawls the Meta tags

A web site is highly useful to a business when the customers find it, when it is readable, easy to navigate, and contains lots of organized information that captures heir interest.

Catherine Alcivar, March 11, 2006